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An anonymous reader writes "The idea of using virtual reality and gaming technologies to create training exercises and business simulations has been around for years. But recent advances in computer graphics, interfaces, and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games have made it commercially viable to pursue simulations in the business world. Novel, a venture-backed startup company, is about to launch a new MMO role-playing game, called Empire & State, with an unusual goal: to use the technology and the lessons it learns from the game to create simulations for big companies that want to improve their human resources and hiring efficiencies. Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario. That's the goal, but Novel will face challenges of all sorts — business, social, and technical — in its efforts to sell MMO technologies to the corporate world."

My Wet dream is to become CEO of a large corporation and immediately give all of HR the pink slip.

Seriously, I fantasize about this. For most companies this would be an immediate jump to the black.

My biggest beef with HR? Refusing to consider anyone that doesn't posses a degree that basically proves they acquired a certain level of book knowledge while marinating their brain in the toxic waste of micro-organisms ( yeast ) . They have No real operative knowledge on what the position requires hiring b

Who would you then hire to ensure that employees are well-informed about the law and policies that cover them, who ensure that employee grievances are handled properly, and who manage the paperwork and such for benefits and so forth? Who would be responsible for making sure employees were fully informed (in a uniform and consistent way) at interviews about company benefits, and so on?

HR does a lot more than managing hiring, doesn't it? Sure, we want to think of them as useless twits who either screen out the good applicants we want or screen US out when we want to apply via bogus job requirements, but not all of them are like that. Moreover, there are many important parts of any business/employee relationship which have to be fulfilled by SOMEONE.

Then it is a lot of practical use, and those employees get appointed to the position of CEO. Or haven't you been watching the politics/developements (read games) played by large modern businesses lately?

The practical use is to burn up some flex time, or maybe ride the time clock for a few more minutes to suck up a little bit more overtime. Do it early in the week, rack up 15 minutes here, and 30 minutes there, and at the end of the week, you can get paid overtime to do real work, that way management won't think twice about authorizing it.

That's not even necessary. You may rest assured that that already happens all the time.

You are there in an environment where people know they are monitored constantly and that their ability is assessed. We jokingly once called it the company's Heisenberg problem: The system works differently when examined. And people actually do behave differently when they are under supervision.

The whole fallacy of all "leadership" models is still that people work for the company. They don't. They couldn't care less about

“Our innovation is that players have never been given the ability to explore real business practices and politics before,” Olson says. “We’ve never had the ability to do anything but kill stuff before [in MMOs].”

Really? Because that sounds EXACTLY like every other MMO that tries to revolve around business and practices.

Empire & State even has a military element!

*sigh* People who think they are the first ones to do something need to do their research.

You know, I was just saying yesterday that I'm so glad we don't get inundated anymore with news articles that present Second Life as if it's some great business tool, and that it's somehow "Important". That meme passed, and now it's all about how Twitter is somehow "Important".

FTFA: Players start out as citizens of an empire, and can collaborate and compete with other players to become leaders of young companies or presidents of countries. Depending on their interests, they can also become criminal overlords, military strategists, bounty hunters, or business tycoons. The game itself will be free, but Novel will charge money for transactions within the game, like when players want to purchase clothing, weapons, or housing. “Our innovation is that players have never been given the ability to explore real business practices and politics before,” Olson says. “We’ve never had the ability to do anything but kill stuff before [in MMOs].”...Doesn't sound like something I would want my employees doing instead of, you know, being productive...

Any word on what technology this is built on? IMHO there's no reason not to use a platform like OpenCobalt in favour of reinventing the wheel. Especially in a business environment, where bleeding-edge graphics power isn't the point...

Maybe it's cultural, but several games in S Korea would beg to differ, that is, if games were people (or dogs) capable of begging.

Even in the US, micropayment games are having some success... it's only a matter of time before we see more games with a macro number of micropayments being required for competing at the highest level.

Try armada online then, its free to play*, and you can't buy anything.
*well there are opportunity costs to be factored in, and electricity, and you sorta need a pc and an internet connection, and cafeen to fuel the beast and...but other wise totaly free)

Imagine assessing employees' leadership and teamwork skills by jacking them into a virtual, multiplayer business scenario.

I could see this being used for new hires, where the typical interview process doesn't bring out their true capabilities. For already hired employees, I could see it being used as an indicator for future performance. Standard assessment methods could still be used effectively for present performance. So the virtual test might be useful as a way of preparing employees for dealing with future adverse business conditions, hostile work situations, different and/or increased responsibilities, or just normal t

It's had some serious setbacks so far. Computers - with their inherent tendency to accurate process information - seem to have difficulty processing the normal levels of cronyism, petty gossip, office politics, nepotism. and "yes-man" traits required to to advance within normal corporate power structures. It's also been a major challenge to properly implement the Peter Principle. We're using a sort of inverted genetic algorithm in which the worst possible candidate is chosen to fill a vacant position. It's

People play MMOs to tackle non-real-world problems where X hours of hard work according to precise set of rules R gives you precisely defined outcome O, with loot from [L1, L2, L3,...]. They play precisely to escape from the fact the same effort in the real world gets you one from [nada, less than nada, peanuts, laughed at].
There is space for the use of MMOs to train people and it's not new, but most of the time it's set up by people who think that gamers need to be patronised.
"Got Game" is an interest

Consciences impede the rate of wealth harvesting in some sectors of the American economy; games requiring cooperation which also reward betrayal could provide quite useful information for, say, someone contemplating the creation of a hedge fund or the next variation of the synthetic mortgage-backed financial instruments scam.

Hi everyone, my name is David and I'm the lead engineer at Novel Interactive. I would like to hopefully clear up some of the confusion related to the article posted here, which was recently published in Xconomy.
Although technically similar, Empire & State and the business simulations are two entirely different products. While Empire & State is an MMORPG, you can think of our business simulations as being an MMO hr solution. These enterprise hr solutions are rooted in our MMO technology, but are

This seems to be following a trend where people think that adding "a game" to something mundane (usually related to soul-destroying work) can make things better. The recent example was Jesse Schell's talk at the 2010 DICE conference. There's also been a lot of people who have used the appeal of MMOs being able to gather a lot of people into one area to use these worlds as beds for research. There have been a lot of academic papers trying to glean economic insight based on the activity of players in diffe